Oh, this is so boring. But smart people I know have been suckered in by it, so I suppose it needs to be rebutted. How tedious.

1) President Obama actually reduced the deficit since George Bush’s last deficit was $1.416 trillion.

In a sleight of hand worthy of a 7-year-old magician wannabe, he notes that, since Bush signed the 2009 budget, he is therefore responsible for all the debt in 2009, which was $1.416 trillion. He does not, however, explain that the stimulus was passed that year and added drastically to the deficit for 2009. Why is there no mention this? Because the author is interested only in political point-scoring, not the truth.

2) Obama actually cut taxes

This one is actually true. President Obama did cut taxes as a part of the stimulus. But apparently those tax cuts had no effect on the deficit described above, being replaced by money from the happiness rainbow tree that the author believes Obama keeps in the back yard. It is entertaining that the author says these tax cuts were “wasted” since he will soon cite the CBO report on the stimulus, which claims that the tax cuts helped stimulate growth. Consistency is apparently not as much fun as throwing poo.

3) President Obama didn’t bail out the banks, George Bush did.

True, but Obama did vote for the bailout, as did John McCain. Perhaps he is claiming that Senators aren’t important and shouldn’t be held responsible for their own actions and that Congress has virtually nothing to do with governing the nation, in which case the whole article seems irrelevant since it’s not a presidential election and changing Congress won’t actually have an effect on anything. It’s hard to tell, he’s short on details.

4) The stimulus totally worked

He cites the CBO report on the stimulus. Whoop-de-do. The CBO report is an estimate based on an algorithm. When the Obama administration went to the CBO before the stimulus, the CBO plugged the numbers into a computer and said “If you spend X money, you will get Y jobs”. Nearly 2 years later, the Obama administration asked the CBO to plug the numbers in again and – surprise! – they got the same result. It is not based on any actual measurement of the job market, it’s based on a model.

A better way of determining if the stimulus worked would be to ask “Did we follow the unemployment curve the administration said we would?” The answer is “hell no”. Unemployment is far worse than the administration predicted with the stimulus. This is a point which the author explains at length. I’m just kidding; he totally ignores it, perhaps imagining that he had addressed it but could no longer make out the words from behind the spittle covering his laptop screen.

5) Businesses don’t hire based on tax cuts

Young, small businesses hire more than big businesses. They will usually work the people they have as much as possible until it becomes clear that they cannot pull in any more business without new people. Fewer taxes means more money. More money could simply mean more profit (as it has recently with larger companies), or it could mean more growth, more employees, even more money. It varies from business to business. But saying “it’s complicated” does not give the author the intellectual political anger management outlet he clearly needs, so I guess we should be glad he’s not biting anyone’s fingers off.

Yes, Social Security has run a surplus… up to this year when it ran a decifit. Projections have it pushing back into surplus for a couple years until, in 2016, it dips back into deficit forever. “No problem,” the increasingly dense author of the article says, “There’s a trust fund”. Yeah… a trust fund held in US debt. The SS trust fund buys up US debt, which the government pays back regularly, so it’s a pretty safe asset. That trust fund should last for a while, but eventually we will be paying Social Security returns to older investors (the elderly) from their own money or money paid by newer investors (the younger generation).

Here the author talks about how the government spends so much on infrastructure, roads, airports, schools (in an ideal world these things are all good for the economy) but only a “small part of the government’s budget” is for welfare and foreign aid. I’m kind of funny inasmuch as I think that 60% of our budget is not a “small part”. (I’m counting SS, Medicare/Medicaid, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and “other” mandatory programs. But not interest on the debt.)

Roads and schools? (Transportation and Education) They account for 3.3% of the budget. Since welfare and foreign aid are such a “small part” of the budget, the author won’t mind if we get rid of it. I’d be delighted if we reduced the other parts of the budget so that Transportation and Education made the bulk of it.

Overall, the author targets builds up conservative strawmen of “lies” and then uses liberal strawmen (and selective data) to “prove” them wrong. This article is nothing more than red meat for people who already agree and don’t have time to do the research themselves. It’s sloppy, lazy, angry and impotent. And, worst of all, it spreads disinformation. Hopefully this post is something of an antidote.

(Note: There are few links here because this data is so easily available and I’m in a crunch time at work.)